A Bit More Detail

• This Shane Mitchell op-ed at Spacing warns about how plans for a new hospital in Windsor can threaten to promote sprawl.


• Debates over bike traffic laws are ongoing in Calgary. Global News reports.


• Guardian Cities looks at how the downtown of the French city of Mulhouse has been successfully regenerated.


• Guardian Cities looks at how the infamous housing estate of Scampia outside of Naples, famously derelict and a nexus for crime, is finally being torn down.


• Atlas Obscura notes an Armenian church in Dhaka, last remnant of a once-vast Armenian trading diaspora that extended out to Bengal.

• Low-lying Windsor, Ontario, faces the prospect of serious flooding that might be alleviated if old features of the natural landscape like trees and wetlands were restored. CBC reports.


• Robert Vandewinkel at Huffington Post Québec makes an argument for a subway system for Québec City.


• Jason Markusoff at MacLean's, noting the referendum vote in Calgary against hosting the 2026 Olympics, suggests this vote can be best sign as a sign of this city's maturity and confidence, that Calgary does not need the Olympics to be successful.


• The Diplomat notes how costs for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics have ballooned, despite promises of an affordable Olympics.


• VICE notes the plight of the Central American refugees gathering at Tijuana, unlikely to gain asylum in the United States.

Windsor officials are promising a thorough investigation and possible bylaw violation charges after the GM smokestack came down unannounced with a loud thud Tuesday afternoon.

Emergency crews were called to the former GM transmission plant between Kildare and Walker roads shortly after 3 p.m. when a crew with Jones Group Inc. completed the demolition, which had failed three times on Aug. 10.

“They did not give us the required notice,” said City of Windsor chief building official John Revell.

“So it was done without any public notice. They didn’t notify the city, it’s … I don’t know what to say about it, other than we are doing an investigation. And more information will be forthcoming.”

A woman who answered the phone at Jones Group who would only identify herself as Tracy said the company would have a statement about the demolition sometime on Wednesday.

Supporters of CBEF 540 AM were seeking an injunction to stop Societe Radio-Canada from cutting local programming at the station. Justice J. Templeton rejected the application on the basis that she did not have the jurisdiction to grant the injunction.

In a recent round of job cuts at CBC and Radio-Canada, CBEF saw its staff slashed from nine employees to two.

Nicole Larocque, president of SOS CBEF, a citizen's committee working to save the station, said the group is disappointed with the decision.

CBEF serves a francophone community of about 35,000 people, and has an audience of between 1,000 and 2,000 people per week. Local content has already been severely reduced. Before the cuts, the station produced a three-hour morning show. Now, Windsorites get only 20 minutes of local content on the show, which is piped in from Toronto.

Le Détroit was originally a French colony that included the area on both sides of the Detroit River. To this day, three hundred years after its foundation, French language and culture still survive in the area, primarily on the Canadian side of the river. There are francophone communities in Windsor and in several little villages throughout Essex and Kent Counties — places like Rivière-aux-Canards (River Canard), LaSalle, McGregor, Tecumseh, Belle-Rivière, Pointe-aux-Roches (Stoney Point), St-Joachim, Pain Court, Grande Pointe, among others. But who are these Francophones? Where did they come from? How have they kept their language and their culture alive in the very centre of English-speaking North America?

The French founded a colony at le Détroit du lac Érié in 1701. Détroit means “strait”, and that’s exactly what the Detroit River is: the strait between Lake Erie and Lake Saint Clair. The colony was the brainchild of Antoine Cadillac, first commander of Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit. He brought soldiers, farmers and merchants, as well as members of several First Nations, to settle in the area, in order to help defend the Great Lakes and French possessions in the interior against advances by the British and their Iroquois allies. Initially, the colonists settled on the north shore of the river (on what is now the American side). But from1749 on, they began occupying the south shore as well. Some of the settlers came directly from France, others from the Saint Lawrence River Valley. They practised a bit of agriculture, but most of them relied on hunting and fishing and the fur trade to earn a living. The colony became a British possession in 1760, but Francophones continued to settle in the area. Even after the north shore became part of the United States in 1796, the Detroit River remained for all intents and purposes a French river.

After the War of 1812, new French settlement in the area pretty much came to a halt. Essex and Kent Counties began to fill up with Loyalists and new settlers from the British Isles. On the American side of the river, thousands of settlers from New England headed for the newly opened Michigan territory. The French-speaking population quickly became a minority. At more than a thousand kilometers from Montréal, they were cut off from the rest of the French-speaking world. On the American side, the French language all but died out.

But on the south shore, a new wave of immigration from the Saint Lawrence River valley would reinforce the French population. Beginning in the 1850s, because of a severe economy depression in Lower Canada, hundreds of families headed for the rich agricultural farmland of Southern Ontario. Many came to work on the construction of the Great Wester Railroad that now linked Windsor with Montréal. These new settlers cleared land all along the Canadian shore of Lake Saint Clair, east of where the first group of Francophones had settled. Most of them came to farm the land. They brought with them many of the ideas and institutions of Lower Canada and established an important French-Canadian presence from Tecumseh to Grande Pointe.

In the midst of an enduring slump by the Big Three automakers and a main street already pockmarked by empty store fronts, the last thing bordertown Windsor needs is to see its number one source of local television news go silent.

What makes the imminent closure of CHWI-TV – the A-channel affiliate owned by CTV and slated to go off the air in August – even more puzzling is that the station has a loyal viewership three times the size of its only other Canadian competition, the CBC.

As media companies face plunging earnings in a recession-wracked economy, the local news at noon, 6 and 11 p.m. may become the ultimate victim.

"The viewers are puzzled and they don't understand, if the station has been so successful, why it's closing," said Cal Johnstone, A Channel's news director in the city of 200,000.

[. . .]

Viewers are stunned because of the connection they feel to local news, said Johnstone, who has formerly worked in Toronto.

"I sat in an office in Don Mills and I would almost never hear from viewers, even if they had a complaint. Here in town, I get phone calls in the middle of the newscast, from people who liked the story or didn't like the story," he added.

Dave Cooke, a former provincial cabinet minister and Windsor MPP, called the news "quite depressing."

"Psychologically, there's a lot of things that have been happening in town that haven't really been lifting people's spirits. But the symbolism of losing a TV station ... is pretty demoralizing," Cooke said.